Brewster Kahle

Kahle stated that even public-domain material published before 1923, and not bound by copyright law, is still bound by Google's contracts and requires permission to be distributed or copied.

Kahle reasoned that this trend has emerged for a number of reasons: distribution of information favoring centralization, the economic cost of digitizing books, the issue of library staff without the technical knowledge to build these services, and the decision of administrators to outsource information services.

Brewster Lurton Kahle (born October 21, 1960) is an American digital librarian, a computer engineer, Internet entrepreneur, and advocate of universal access to all knowledge.

He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982 with a Bachelor of Science in computer science and engineering, where he was a member of the Chi Phi Fraternity.

The emphasis of his studies was artificial intelligence; he studied under Marvin Minsky and W. Daniel Hillis.

After graduation, he joined Thinking Machines team, where he was the lead engineer on the company's main product, the Connection Machine, for six years (1983–1989).

There, he and others developed the WAIS system, the first Internet distributed search and document retrieval system, a precursor to the World Wide Web.

In 1992, he co-founded, with Bruce Gilliat, WAIS, Inc. (sold to AOL in 1995 for $15 million ), and, in 1996, Alexa Internet (sold to Amazon.com in 1999 for $250 million in stock ).

At the same time as he started Alexa, he founded the Internet Archive, which he continues to direct.

In 1996, Kahle founded the Internet Archive and co-founded Alexa Internet.

In 1997, Kahle explained that apart from the value for historians' use of these digital archives, they might also help resolve some common infrastructure complaints about the Internet, such as adding reliability to "404 Document not found" errors, contextualizing information to make it more trustworthy, and maintaining navigation to aid in finding related content.

Kahle also explained the importance of packaging enough meta-data (information about the information) into the archive, since it is unknown what future researchers will be interested in, and that it might be more problematic to find data than to preserve it.

In 2001, he implemented the Wayback Machine, which allows public access to the World Wide Web archive that the Internet Archive has been gathering since 1996.

Kahle was inspired to create the Wayback Machine after visiting the offices of Alta Vista, where he was struck by the immensity of the task being undertaken and achieved: to store and index everything that was on the Web.

Kahle states: "I was standing there, looking at this machine that was the size of five or six Coke machines, and there was an 'aha moment' that said, 'You can do everything.'

Kahle advocated in 2009:

It's not that expensive.

For the cost of 60 miles of highway, we can have a 10 million-book digital library available to a generation that is growing up reading on-screen.

Our job is to put the best works of humankind within reach of that generation.

Through a simple Web search, a student researching the life of John F. Kennedy should be able to find books from many libraries, and many booksellers—and not be limited to one private library whose titles are available for a fee, controlled by a corporation that can dictate what we are allowed to read.

Kahle was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering (2010) for archiving, and making available, all forms of digital information.

He is also a member of the Internet Hall of Fame, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and serves on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, the European Archive (now Internet memory) and the Television Archive.

He is a member of the advisory board of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program of the Library of Congress, and is a member of the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure.

In 2010 he was given an honorary doctorate in computer science from Simmons College, where he studied library science in the 1980s.

Kahle and his wife, Mary Austin, run the Kahle/Austin Foundation.

The Foundation supports the Free Software Foundation for its GNU Project, among other projects, with a total giving of about $4.5 million in 2011.

In a 2011 talk Kahle described Google's 'snippet' feature as a means of tiptoeing around copyright issues, and expressed his frustration with the lack of a decent lending system for digital materials.

He said the digital transition has moved from local control to central control, non-profit to for-profit, diverse to homogeneous, and from "ruled by law" to "ruled by contract".

"Knowledge lives in lots of different forms over time," Kahle said in 2011.

"First it was in people's memories, then it was in manuscripts, then printed books, then microfilm, CD-ROMs, now on the digital internet. Each one of these generations is very important."

Voicing a strong reaction to the idea of books simply being thrown away, and inspired by the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Kahle envisioned collecting one physical copy of every book ever published.

"We're not going to get there, but that's our goal," he said.

"We want to see books live forever."

Pointing out that even digital books have a physical home on a hard drive somewhere, he sees saving the physical artifacts of information storage as a way to hedge against the uncertainty of the future.

In 2012, he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.

Kahle was born in New York City and raised in Scarsdale, New York, the son of Margaret Mary (Lurton) and Robert Vinton Kahle, a mechanical engineer.

He went to Scarsdale High School.

In 2012, Kahle and banking veteran Jordan Modell established Internet Archive Federal Credit Union to serve people in New Brunswick, N.J. and Highland Park, New Jersey, as well as participants in programs that alleviate poverty in those areas.

The credit union voluntarily liquidated in 2015.

Kahle has been critical of Google's book digitization, especially of Google's exclusivity in restricting other search engines' digital access to the books they archive.